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This Sunday, Bungie finally debuted their long-awaited post-Halo project, Destiny. "Debut" may be a strong word as there's barely any gameplay footage released yet, but we did get lengthy explanations about what they're trying to achieve with the game.

In short, it's a shooter with a storyline and release cycle that's already being planned to span an entire decade. Most companies don't have the luxury of planning that far ahead, but it's clear Bungie knows they have a hit on their hands, and seem to believe that when Destiny is released, we'll all be going "Master who?"

Erik Kain recently made me aware of Betteridge's Law which says for any headline that's a question, the answer is always "no." While that's true for ones like "Is chocolate the way to beat cancer?" I'm really hoping that's not the case for my own header here today.

Bungie is looking to blow apart the shooter genre with Destiny in ways I can only hope will be good for the genre overall. Though information is still vague about the project, a few things become clear when you read about what to expect from the game.

Destiny aims to be a living, breathing world. You can hop from post-apocalyptic Chicago to Mars and back again and hang out in the various world hubs in between fighting against or alongside other players. They're not using the word "MMO" or its variant, "MMOFPS," but the terms "social" and "questing" are being thrown around enough so that the descriptors don't seem entirely inaccurate.

When you start the game, there's no menu, you're simply dropped straight into the world. You choose a class, upgrade your armor, weapons and vehicles. You become a character in the universe in ways that presumably blend single and multiplayer together. What exactly that looks like is unclear, but it does seem like Destiny will finally break us out of what's become an exceptionally stale format for shooters over the years.

Nearly every single franchise is guilty, from Call of Duty to Battlefield to even Bungie's Halo. I get that brands want to stick with what works, but I think many of us can agree it's getting a bit tiresome.

Almost all shooters released these days follow the same three-pronged format. There's a singleplayer campaign that lasts anywhere from 6 to 10 hours, then a separate multiplayer component with matchmaking lobbies and rank-up unlockables. Usually, there's a third mode which includes bonus missions like Modern Warfare's Spec Ops, Black Ops' Zombies or Halo's Spartan Ops.

No matter how different the gameplay or setting, this format is always followed to the letter with almost no room for variance. This is how it's been since Goldeneye (and earlier), and it seems like the genre just won't evolve past it.

But with Destiny it seems like we are indeed finally experiencing some sort of revolution. Or at least an attempt at one. Not to say Destiny necessarily started it. Games like Planetside 2 and Dust 514 are MMOFPSs where multiplayer matches have weight and are threaded into a grand story of the universe. But at least from what we've seen, it's Destiny's goal to take even that concept to another level entirely.

Obviously, these are all big promises. Despite how much we trust Bungie after Halo, Destiny could very well turn out to be failed experiment and the ten year plan may have been biting off more than they could chew, even with the backing of a giant like Activision.

But I want to believe, I really do. We need something to free us of this endless cycle of cookie cutter shooters that are only allowed to follow one format. We need our video game worlds to be constant and endless, not thrown out in eight hour chunks every two years.

What other medium has the ability to tell a constantly shifting , unpredictable story over the course of ten years? Not many. Only a few epic film series have that distinction, along with the occasional smash hit TV show. We need a video game that's able to do something similar, and Destiny could be it. And if it can't, perhaps at the very least it will inspire others to try.

We need more than a very nice flip book of concept art and a lot of big ideas to go off of, but from what Bungie's shown us so far, Destiny looks like it could be a huge step forward for gaming. Everyone talks about the next generation of consoles, but gaming has to evolve in terms of software, not just hardware. If we can't expand our minds about what a game can be, the medium will never truly evolve, no matter how good the graphics get.